


Fee Fi Fo Fum

by vinnie2757



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 18th century vaguely lmao, Explicit Language, F/M, Jack and the beanstalk au, Secret Relationship, but it'll be really minor and not paid attention to, but there are a few close calls, everyone is here and has a role to play, fairy tale AU, there will be minor sam/nat and steve/bucky kicking around, theres a betting pool about clint and laura and everyones in on it, theres a few giants and its great, theres no sex or death, theres some minor horror elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-09-06 23:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20299570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Every year, in their busy little world, there's a May Fayre. It's a fun time with stalls and entertainment and dancing. There's a tourney, where Clint gets to win his lady's favour (even if he can't have her hand, he can have her favour, and that's good enough), and Laura gets to give her man her favour. They might even get to have a few moments masquerading as a courting couple, if they're lucky.Every five years, there's a pageant to find the May Queen. Steve says she always disappears, but everyone thinks it's just paranoia. It's just Steve listening to the local spinster too much, right? Right? It's not got anything to do with Gallows Hill and the beanstalk growing out the top of it. Not at all.[Jack and the Beanstalk inspired fairy tale au]





	1. Afternoon Tea and a Gentle Stroll

Laura wakes early, with the dawn, to a banging on the door. It’s melodic, and belongs to only one person, so it takes her only a second to react. She leaps out of bed and fusses with her hair, tripping over her feet as she pulls her robe on and rushes down the stairs to open the door. Clint is smiling before the door’s all the way, and she desperately hopes she hasn’t got drool on her face.

‘Good morning,’ he says, and holds up a basket. ‘I brought you breakfast. Well, us. I haven’t eaten yet, and I’m starving.’

She steps aside to let him in. ‘Good morning,’ she replies, and fusses with her hair as she shuts the door. ‘I wasn’t expecting you today.’

He shrugs, and puts the basket on the table, goes to the stove to get it going for her while she fills the kettle and gets the crockery.

‘Well, the market had some good stuff, and I thought, well, we haven’t had breakfast very often lately, and what better occasion than any day you choose?’

She looks at him over the muslin-wrapped bread, and smiles.

‘Sure,’ she says, ‘just watch you don’t burn yourself, I’m out of salve.’

He snorts, elbow deep in the stove with a flint in his hand. ‘I do this all the time, I’m not going to – ow, shit!’

She jerks towards him as he pulls his hand free and shakes it out.

‘Splinter!’ he exclaims, offended, and she puts a hand on her forehead.

‘Get out of my house,’ she tells him, and he laughs, gets the stove lit and the kettle warming.

‘You’d miss me if I was gone,’ he tells her, and gets to his feet, dusting himself down and shutting the stove’s door. ‘You want a hand with that?’

‘I have it under control,’ she says, ‘but – Mister Howlett brought me by some more logs, for the fire, but I haven’t had time to chop them. I don’t suppose, if you have time after breakfast?’

His ears go pink at the look on her face, soft and uncertain, in a way she has no need to be, because Clint will tear time for her from the very seams of reality itself.

‘Of course,’ he says with a nod, and reaches across the table to take the breadknife from her so he can finish cutting the loaf. ‘After breakfast though.’

As if on cue, his belly rumbles, and she laughs the sort of laugh that makes the hair on his neck stand on end and something warm flutter down his spine. He’s brought her fruit and cold cuts (not pig, though, he’s learned that she doesn’t eat pig, and he doesn’t really understand why, she just tells him it’s unclean, and that’s as far as the conversation gets because he doesn’t want to fight with her about how all meat is the same) and the miller had been selling some oats, so he’s brought her some of those too, knows she’s fond of oats in the morning. The milk is fresh, but he’s already downed one glass and she wouldn’t like him drinking the rest when she has uses for it.

He watches her pottering around, fussing with her hair as she goes about making tea and getting more crockery to join the plates she’s already got.

‘You all awake?’ he asks, and she looks at what she’s doing before flushing that pretty high flush she has when he’s caught her out.

‘I don’t think so,’ she laughs, and flicks a finger under her eye. ‘I’ll get there in a moment, I just – I need tea.’

‘Then sit,’ he says, getting to his feet, ‘and eat your bread, and I’ll make you tea.’

Her fingers brush his as they pass, and he keeps his back to her for several long seconds, mouthing to himself that he needs to grow up. It isn’t that he’s in love with her, far from it. He’s just. You know.

Desperately in love with her and has been since he was fifteen and knew that girls were available to be loved with every fibre of his being.

‘Have you thought about my offer?’ she asks, and he turns back, cup in hand.

‘Yes,’ he says, because it’s not the offer of her hand that he wants, but she’s offering kindness all the same. ‘But I think you’d be wasting your time. Teach the punks to read, I’m too far gone, and I don’t need to read.’

She wrinkles her mouth. ‘I think you’re wrong,’ she says, and he shrugs, puts the cup down next to her before helping himself to an apple.

‘You always think I’m wrong, but who brings you breakfast?’

‘Steve, sometimes, if he’s feeling well, and Bucky will bring me breakfast too. Nat brought me a stuffed chicken last week, but I don’t know what she’d stuffed it with so it, uh. It got put out for the foxes. But don’t tell her that.’

Clint wants to start on her about not telling him Nat brought her a chicken, but then he snorts.

‘I don’t think she really understands how to show that she likes you,’ he says, ‘she kicks me in the shin.’

‘I kick you in the shin,’ she reminds him, and looks at him over the lip of her cup.

‘Yes, but you do it nicely. She bruises.’

‘Then put wood down the front of your boots, you unfashionable heathen.’

‘If you think I’m going about my day in those pig-ugly shoes, then you and I won’t be friends.’

‘A tragedy for the ages,’ she hums, turning her attention to the berries, ‘I shall have to speak to the puppeteer the next time I pass his shop, and tell him of the new tale he has to tell.’

Clint flicks a blueberry at her, and her droll expression breaks into a smile, then a grin, then a laugh, finally, a giggle on the tip of her tongue, and his heart rolls over itself, giddy with the happiness she brings. A personal ray of sunlight, a twinkling star in his own private orbit. But not his, not really. He has no real claim on her, beyond the favour she gifts him at the tourneys.

‘What have you got planned for the day?’ he asks, ‘besides watching me chop up the logs for the fire? I don’t know why Mister Howlett doesn’t do it himself.’

‘I think he knows you like to be my man about the house,’ she says, ‘and he doesn’t want to invade your territory.’

Clint snorts. ‘That hasn’t stopped Mister Howlett before.’

‘Mister Howlett tells me he had an earful from a certain somebody for chopping the logs for me before delivering them.’

Clint snorts again. ‘Then Mister Howlett wants to put some extra inches on his shoes, if she can reach his ear.’

Laura frowns for half a second, and then realises what he means. ‘I thought he meant you!’

‘You think I’m going to go and tell him not to do something? I’m taller than the man but he could put me through a wall, I’m not that stupid.’

‘You aren’t stupid at all, I wish you’d stop with that.’

‘Eh,’ he says, with a shrug, and shoves half a slice of bread in his mouth. ‘We can’t all have a proper education.’

‘Not shitting on the floor is all the education anyone needs,’ Laura tells him, in one of those rare moments where Laura’s genteel nature breaks and she becomes someone he’d meet in the tavern instead of her pretty little rose garden.

He laughs, and leans across the table to kiss her. She hums happily against his lips, her smile making it hard to really kiss her, but he does his best, considering.

When he retreats to his side of the table, his ears are red, and she’s got fluttery eyelashes, and he loves her. He loves her so much, and he almost hates it, except her fluttering eyelashes, and her laughter, and the gold in her eyes when she smiles _his_ smile, they’re the reasons he wakes up in the morning.

‘What are you going to do in the afternoon?’ she asks, ‘once you’re done with the logs?’

‘I promised Sam I’d go out with him,’ Clint shrugs, ‘he wants to see what the birds have found, because they’ve been skittish lately, so he says, something in the skies. I don’t know, he doesn’t really do a good translation.’

‘It is a free service,’ she reminds him, as though that excuses the fact Sam doesn’t translate what the birds tell him very well.

He hums. ‘Well, either way, they’re getting skittish, so he wants to see what’s what.’

‘Come to think of it, I haven’t heard them in the evenings lately, even the bats are quiet. Normally, the swifts are having a right old chatter at dusk, but they haven’t in, oh, a week?’

He frowns, a tiny little frown that’s barely more than a crease between his brows, and then it clears and he’s back to smiling.

‘We’ll see what they say,’ he says with a shrug and helps himself to another half-slice of bread from her plate. 

‘Get your own plate!’ she crows, and lifts the old china out of his reach. ‘It’s _right there_, you horrible man!’

He laughs, and her feet find his under the table, and talk turns to other things; the children of the town, and the things Laura has been teaching them, the latest news about the May Fayre, the newest scandal of the mayor and his staff. There’s some tittering about drama up in the castle, with King Alexander and his cronies, the ones in the black coats that come and snoop about the business of the town for no real purpose. Clint doesn’t get on with them; hell, for that matter, _nobody_ gets on with them. How Steve hasn’t been spirited away yet, they aren’t sure, but they agree it is only a matter of time.

‘I don’t know, though,’ Laura hedges, a strawberry almost in her mouth, ‘have you seen the way Bucky looks at him, when he thinks no one’s looking at him? They’d have a hard job getting Steve out of arm’s reach, if they thought half a second about it.’

‘I try my best not to look at him, if I’m honest,’ Clint says, and rubs his neck, a nervous tic he’s never been able to hide. ‘It’s not the whole arm thing that gets me, that’s what it is, he did a damn fine thing that day, and nobody’s going to hold that against him. But that _stare_!’

‘Some of the girls in town moon over it,’ Laura grimaces, ‘I see them on my way through with the children. They all sigh and preen and think he’s going to pay them any notice.’

‘I’ve never really seen him chase skirts,’ Clint agrees, ‘even before the whole Hydra business.’

‘It’s been nearly an entire decade,’ Laura sighs, ‘and it feels like yesterday.’

Her father had been alive then, and had spent the day and the night and the day following helping them keep the Hydra slayers alive. She remembers the blood on his sleeves, and the smell of sweat under his arms, and the greyness to his face when they had to cut at the skin of Bucky’s arm to give him a clean scar. She remembers it well, and she thinks he’d be proud of how far Bucky’s come in the last few years.

‘Things like that don’t just stop happening in your head,’ Clint says, which almost sounds wise, and Laura has known him long enough now to know what he means.

‘Memories are hard to forget,’ she agrees, which is what he wanted to say but hadn’t finished thinking about it before he spoke.

It’s a common occurrence with Clint, and a large part of why she likes him so much.

He offers her a smile, not a grateful one, because he knows what he means, but grateful that she understood him too. She smiles back, and they get caught like that for a moment, just sat there smiling at each other like fools.

‘Hey,’ he says, when the silence has begun to drag, because she’s right, there’s no birdsong, and the house is eerily quiet. ‘You know, don’t you?’

She reaches across the table to take his hand. ‘I do.’

Colour comes to the edge of his ears, and he ducks his chin.

‘Come on, then,’ he says, ‘you better get dressed, and I’ll make a start on these logs. Sam wanted to get out there by lunchtime, so I’d better get moving.’

She nods, messes with her hair, and pushes her chair back. ‘I’ll meet you out there.’

He watches he swish her way to the stairs, because Laura is the kind of girl that would swish in a hemp sack without ever really realising she’s swishing – unlike Natasha, who knows exactly what she’s doing, even though she’s seventeen and a thorn in his side – and he can’t resist looking at her. When she’s gone, he hurries outside, and finds out the axe to start chopping up the logs. He pauses, after a minute to two, and listens close; she’s got the windows open, and he can just about hear her singing to herself, the soft slosh of water as she swills a cloth. His heart does a funny twist and a turn, and he stares at the window for a second too long before turning back to the logs.

She’s dressed for a day in town when she comes down to him, her neckline open where the scarf hasn’t been tucked in and her hair carefully pinned up out of the way, and she’s beautiful, she really is. He could marry her, if he had an estate worth her weight. His estate is one of the rooms of Tony’s manor, because Tony is arguably nice like that, but really it’s a kindness to old Mister Jarvis, who can’t be getting on his hands and knees to brush the carpet any more, and Tony could afford her, if he had half an interest in anything outside of his tinkering. Miss Potts gives him some small interest, when he’s inclined to see her skirts swish, but otherwise Laura, to him, is just a convenient conversational partner. Laura absorbs information, and Tony likes talking, and sometimes she takes the children to see what he’s tinkering with, and if he’s in a prepared sort of mood, he’ll bodge a toy or the like together from scraps, a walking dog, or a frog that does backflips when you wind the cogs up. She has a few of them lying around, for when the children are unruly or particularly sad, and he thinks she deserves a child of her own, one day. When she meets someone her father would approve of.

This is not to say that Dean didn’t approve of him, because he enjoyed listening to Clint tell tales of his childhood escapades, and Laura was a friend. Dean wanted Laura to have good friends, and Clint had done his damnedest to be the best friend he could be. But he has no money, no title, no anything, and despite his quiet, reserved nature, and his peaceful manner, and his joy of spending all day in the kitchen covered in flour, Dean was a Somebody, and Clint was a Nobody.

And so Clint had just come to the conclusion, too young to really understand what the conclusion meant, that Laura was never going to be his in any way that really mattered. If a suitor came calling, well. He’d just have to get on with it. He’d sort of come to an understanding with Miss Morse across the way, that if it all fell apart, well, he could do worse, he supposes. Her attentions were elsewhere, too, but she was a nobody, same as him, and she could do worse. If nothing else, they wouldn’t have to live in someone else’s empty parlour.

But these are all considerations and conclusions to worry about on another day; today is a day where Laura is stood in front of him in a prettier dress than the one she jumps in puddles in, and he’s meant to be chopping wood and not staring at her.

‘You look lovely,’ he tells her.

‘I’m meant to be meeting with one of the castle aides for afternoon tea,’ she says, though her expression does not match the cheeriness of her tone, ‘to discuss the possibility of the children doing something for the May Fayre.’

Clint’s nose wrinkles, for half a second. ‘I can leave Sam with the birds, if you want me to come.’

She shakes her head, and says, ‘no, no, it’s alright, we’re going to Signor Vanni’s.’

Clint has never know Signor Vanni make an afternoon tea in his life, and it makes him snort.

‘No, don’t laugh,’ she says, ‘I mentioned it to him, last week when I dropped off those flowers for his wife, and he insisted. He’s been practising making castle-ready sandwiches.’

Clint actually laughs at that. The idea of Signor Vanni making a dainty little triangle cucumber sandwich, a man who can stuff a baguette to bursting point and still fit it in his mouth, and who carries the hundred-pound sacks of flour around on his shoulders like they weight nothing, that’s a picture.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ he asks, when he’s done chuckling. ‘Sam would understand.’

And Sam would understand, Laura knows this, but she fiddles with her sleeves and scuffs her toes, and then shakes her head.

‘No, no, it’s alright. Signor Vanni knows what’s what, and he’s not afraid to put the aide outside if he has to.’

Signor Vanni is most definitely not afraid to put his foot up someone’s ass, even if he’s half their size, and Clint has always appreciated the man’s staunch refusal to tolerate the cretins from the castle.

‘Alright,’ he says, with a nod, and turns back to the logs. ‘I’m nearly done here; Mister Howlett didn’t bring you many by, hey?’

‘It’s warm enough,’ Laura shrugs, and moves to get the basket for the logs. ‘I don’t have the fire on most evenings now, just a few on rainy evenings.’

Clint nods, and shrugs a little, and gets the last few logs chopped up while she ferries them into the log store.

‘Thank you,’ she says, when he brings the last few across for her, and they’re close enough that their hands are brushing.

‘You’re welcome,’ he replies, fingertips soft against her knuckles, but he daren’t touch any more than can be dismissed as an accident.

‘Guess you’d best be – best be off.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Silence lingers between them. Laura’s toes curl in her shoes, Clint bites his lip. Neither of them look at each other, and just stare at the log store, almost at capacity, but not quite.

Almost, but not quite.

‘Sam will be waiting,’ she says, and pulls herself away, even though her fingertips are aching for the feel of the swell of his veins against his skin.

‘Let me take this in for you,’ he says, gesturing at the basket, ‘so you have some ready, just in case.’

Her lips curl, just enough that he can see, and she nods, follows him inside.

The kiss is tender, fingertips against her chin, and she hates that this is all they have, these fleeting moments between the here and the now, where no one can see them to know anything. She’s heard of the crying shame it is that her father didn’t have her marriage planned before his death, and the chattering about how someone will have to teach her to spin, and she doesn’t have a care for it. She might not be able to walk on his arm, but she’s in Clint’s heart, and if that’s all she can have, then, well, that’ll have to do.

They leave together, because there’s no shame in that, and separate at the main street, Clint heading towards the opposite end of town to find Sam at the blacksmiths, and Laura heading to Vanni’s, to prepare herself for the onslaught of nonsense that will be the meeting with the castle aide.

And if they happen to look back at each other once they’ve parted, no one’s paying attention to notice.

* * *

It’s a weird thing, Gallows Hill. It’s not even a place, it’s a thing, something eerie and out of place and _wrong_ and yet the town wouldn’t exist without it. Clint supposes, standing at the gate taller than him if he had Laura on his shoulders, and peering through at the low fog and grey underbelly of the trees, that something like _Gallows Hill_ deserves to be eerie and wrong and out of place. It’s a hill on which gallows stand and traitors to the crown are executed. Of course it’s eerie.

‘Why are we here again?’ Clint asks.

Sam, stood next to him with a falcon perched on his shoulder like it’s _nothing_, because this is what Sam does, he just stands about the place with a falcon on his shoulder, and Natasha makes eyeballs at him because she’s seventeen and that’s what seventeen year old girls do, only Natasha is not like most girls and so she chooses the man that the _Ladies_ of the town get wrinkles over – when they aren’t getting wrinkles over Clint parading around in long boots and undone coats like the savage he clearly is, anyway – because that’s just the way Natasha is. Anyway, Sam, he stands there and has this falcon on his shoulder, and he looks at Clint, and he doesn’t roll his eyes, because Sam doesn’t do that, but he does look skyward before he looks back at the gates.

‘Because,’ he says, and reaches up without looking to pet the falcon’s beak, ‘the birds are upset about something, and they’re all shrieking about Gallows Hill.’

‘Okay,’ Clint says, because he did ask, ‘but why am _I_ here?’

‘Because people go missing in here and I don’t like my chances.’

Clint supposes this is fair enough.

‘What are we looking for, do we know?’ he asks.

The gate is locked. It’s always locked.

It isn’t locked very well.

Once they’re inside, and stepping into the fog, where the ground is softer, and damper, and Clint discovers a split in the seam of his boot, Sam shrugs the falcon off his shoulder and into the sky. It flaps a few times, finds a tree, and perches there.

It squawks, once, twice.

A titter of smaller birds comes back from the shadows, and Sam listens. Clint waits, twirling his lockpick around his fingers, and resting his other hand gently, gently, on his blade. It’s only little, tucked in flush to his belt, hidden behind his coat. He doesn’t need it, not really, but it’s useful to have.

‘They’re saying that the shadow is back,’ Sam says, and his mouth turns down.

‘The shadow?’ Clint repeats. ‘What shadow? It’s grey in here.’

‘Let’s get higher, and see what’s what.’

Clint does not want to go higher. He tells Sam this.

He says, ‘I don’t really want to go any higher, if it’s alright with you.’

‘No,’ Sam replies. ‘No, it’s not alright. We’re not going to climb the beanstalk, Jack, we’re just going to look at the damn thing.’

Clint pulls a face at Sam’s back, and gets a rude gesture following a titter or two from a finch. He makes a rude gesture at the birds, and they flap off ahead with some more tittering and squawking.

‘Don’t be rude,’ Sam tells him, over his shoulder.

‘Sorry sir,’ Clint replies, and Sam snorts, but they keep walking.

The hill climbs for a long minute or two, and then they break the tree line and come out next to the gallows. Clint hasn’t seen them used more than twice in his adult life, and his childhood was – well, it wasn’t worth remembering, to be honest. If crimes need to be dealt with, Mister Fury does it quietly, with dignity, and without spectacle.

The gallows are, for obvious reasons, a good foot or two above their heads, with weather-worn steps up onto the platform. The hinge of one has broken, and the trapdoor swings and creaks in the breeze. In the silence up here, where no birds can be heard, and the sound of the town, barely half a mile away, is a whisper, it’s a deafening screech of rusted iron. There used to be gibbets on the corners of the platform, and the guillotine still stands, but it’s rusted shut now, not used for a decade or more.

‘You ever think about being a kid?’ Clint asks, as they stand there and stare at the wood, fingers itching to – to – well, he doesn’t know.

‘I try not to,’ Sam replies, because he’s thinking the same thing Clint is.

They both tried to climb the mass of vines and ivy and rot in the middle as kids, they all did. Even _Steve_ with his bony little limbs and his inability to just _breathe_, even he tried to climb it. They never really made it further than they could fall without hurting themselves, but they all tried it. Standing here as adults, knowing the stories, knowing what the fall alone could do to you, even if you weren’t caught and hung on the ropes still coiled tight above the platforms, it just –

‘I don’t want to be here longer than we have to be,’ Clint says.

It comes out barely more than a breath, but the silence is so loud that he’s loud and clear.

‘No shit,’ Sam replies.

They stand there and look at the gallows for a few more moments before Sam finally tears himself away, sniffing hard and swallowing.

‘I don’t know what the birds are worried about,’ he says, ‘the fog’s the same as ever. They’re saying that the shadow’s back, but I don’t see a shadow.’

‘We’ll have to check the water supply,’ Clint says, and Sam looks at him askance before shaking his head and walking around to the other side of the gallows.

‘The stalk looks – rotten,’ he says, voice carrying like a butterfly caught in a hurricane, ‘look at it, I don’t remember it looking like this.’

‘That’s because it didn’t,’ Clint replies, and ducks under the platform to go touch the roots.

He’s not stupid enough to climb it. But he’ll get close. Something isn’t right. Something hasn’t been right for a long time, but nobody he knows has tried to chop the stalk down. It’s just always been there. He doesn’t even know if it’s a beanstalk like in the story; he’s certainly never heard of it flowering, never mind bearing fruit. Vegetable? What are beans?

‘What are beans?’ he asks.

‘I regret bringing you,’ Sam says, from the other side of the stalk. A moment passes, and then he says, ‘they’re seeds.’

‘But are they fruit?’

‘They’re seeds.’

‘Or vegetables?’

Sam draws a breath, the way Clint makes most people draw a breath.

‘You know how when you stand here in silence, you can hear the dead? I prefer that to your voice.’

‘Most people do,’ Clint agrees, amiably.

Sam reappears from behind the stalk, looking sad, the way that this place always makes you sad. He’s grey about the edges, and the silence falls heavy across them again.

‘Let’s go home,’ Clint suggests, because he’s tired.

It’s a tiring sort of place. They’ve got to pass through the graveyard again, and he doesn’t much feel like it. All the graves are lopsided from the dampness in the earth and no one’s been buried there since he was a kid, and god knows he wishes they’d buried his father there just so he could have an excuse to forget about him, but Laura lets him put flowers on the post at the end of her fence as a tribute to his mother, so that’s something, he guesses. It’s not really, but it’s something more than nothing.

The birds are silent as they walk back down the hill and don’t start up again until they’re in the middle of the graves. Sam says that they’re still talking about the shadow, but he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, because there is no shadow, no more than usual.

‘Maybe a storm’s on it’s way,’ Clint suggests, because it’s about all he’s got.

‘Maybe.’ But he doesn’t sound any more convinced than Clint did.

Clint locks the gate behind them, and they stand there staring through it for several long moments, as they had on arrival.

‘Why is it locked off?’ Clint asks.

‘Don’t ask me,’ Sam replies, ‘I woke up to the wall, same as you.’

Clint huffs. ‘Pierce just wanted us to keep off the stalk, is all.’

‘He is King you know.’

‘The Ladies all call me a Godless creature, what makes you think I’m swearing loyalty to that prick?’

‘Thank God we aren’t at war,’ is all Sam says, and tips his head. ‘I’d say thank you, but it was kind of a wasted effort.’

‘Yeah,’ Clint says. ‘If you hear any more, let me know, I’ll tell Steve about it.’

‘I’ll see him later,’ Sam shrugs, and puts his hands in his pockets. The falcon reappears from over the wall and lands on his shoulder. ‘Bucky says he’s been squabbling with the Ladies over lunch again, so. Someone’s got to put some sense into him.’

‘If Bucky can’t manage it, you don’t have a chance.’

‘I don’t know,’ Sam shrugs again, and they start walking, ‘Bucky’s too concerned with the what of Steve’s nonsense. I’m concerned with the why.’

‘I’m more worried about the how,’ Clint counters, ‘have you seen the size of him? He should have been flattened by now.’

‘They’re all too scared of Bucky to start anything. He might only have one arm, but he can still pick Tasha up by it.’

That Sam calls her Tasha, when she objectively hates it, tells Clint that one day he’s going to be walking her down the aisle in place of whatever creature bore her.

They part at the main street; Clint checks the town clock and decides to check on Laura and her afternoon tea, and Sam goes to return to the blacksmith’s, where no doubt some Ladies are after falconry lessons.

The maypole is already up, which is incredibly early, considering there’s a month before the fayre, but he supposes the dancers need to practice. God forbid they try to rope him in again. He’s only in it for the tourney, because he likes to show up the Lords and Ladies who think they know how to shoot a bow. That, and the possibility of maybe, in between the flurry of skirts and swooning proposals, get to dance with Laura.

He might not climb the beanstalk, but he does climb the maypole, just to remind the fayre’s organisers that he can, and laughing, slides down the pole and legs it the three streets to Signor Vanni’s little tearoom. 

* * *

It’s not really a tearoom, but Signor Vanni wants to display himself as a _gentleman_ and so he advertises as a tearoom, and Laura’s not about to dissuade him. She thinks it’s sweet, that he puts on this display of gentility when she knows as well as the rest that he’ll brawl with anybody that he needs to.

When she arrives, with scarf in place and shawl about her shoulders, basket on her arm for groceries later, Signor Vanni sweeps her into his arms. Utterly improper, but he adores her, in the way that she imagines an uncle might, so she embraces him back and laughs at her feet leaving the floor. In her shoes, they’re almost the same height, but he never seems to hold it against her, happy to have her at eye level. He’d expressed, once, some displeasure at the way a man could look down the front of a lady’s dress if she had no scarf or lace across the neckline, and Laura had thought it odd, at the time, but then had examined the faces of gentlemen she spoke to, and started securing her scarf a little more neatly.

She’d been young then. Signor Vanni would argue that she is still young now, but she’s old enough to know better, and know better she does.

‘You have that pig to entertain?’ he asks, as he takes her basket and her shawl and stows them away for her.

The tearoom is busy enough, two men playing cards on the far table, a table of ladies giggling over tea and silk samples, some children with flavoured milk swapping toys like they don’t want to be seen. Laura eyes them, and they eye her back, before sheepishly waving, and stowing their toys away.

‘Has the runner been by yet?’ she asks, ‘I haven’t had a chance to get the news today.’

‘Nothing interesting,’ Signor Vanni says with a shrug, and pulls her chair out for her. ‘Your pig should be by soon, I sent him away when he arrived.’

Laura gives him a level look.

‘You were not here, and I do not want to serve one of that sort without accompaniment. I might get a reputation.’

Laura snorts, and tucks her skirts under her as Signor Vanni disappears through a door, only to return a few moments later with a teapot and a cup.

‘For you, passerrota,’ he says, and she smiles.

‘Thank you, Signor Vanni.’

Signor Vanni dips his head, and looks to the windows. ‘He should not be long, this pig.’

‘Do try not to call him a pig to his face.’

‘He has the look of one, the smell of one and all the manners of one.’

‘So does Clint – Mister Barton, I mean, but you like him.’

‘Mister Barton is a fool, passerrota, not a pig. But he is your fool, and he makes me laugh.’

Laura snorts into her cup, and waves him away. One of the children comes over to her once the chef is gone, and asks about lessons.

‘Tomorrow,’ Laura says, with a soft hand atop the girl’s brown waves, ‘I have to attend this meeting, but tomorrow, I’ll have all day to sit with you, and your brother, if he likes.’

The girl snorts. Her brother would not like, and they both know that. She nods, however, and when the door opens, she makes her exit, quick as a whippet and about as silent. Laura turns her head, and jumps her to feet.

Castle aides have a distinct – and ugly – uniform, all black with silver detailing and carry themselves with the utmost importance. The aide approaching her is not one she’s seen before, but there are plenty, she imagines, that she has never seen. He’s about Clint’s height, and older, maybe, it’s hard to tell. His head is shaved clean, and his skin darker than a tan but not as dark as Sam’s, the colour of warm sand.

‘Good afternoon,’ he says, amiable enough and pleasant, extending a hand.

Laura takes it after a long enough pause to imply rudeness, but not state it, and gives it a hard shake before returning to her seat. Impertinent, but she’s making her position clear before the position has been considered, as you have to with these people.

It’s been well known for years that the castle’s aides are not welcome in the town. The serving girls and boys, the staff not in the uniform, who are family and friends of the townsfolk, they’re welcome any second of the day, but the aides are a blight, and are only tolerated for the sake of peace. Technically speaking, Bucky was an aide of the castle, but he was a guard, and that is a different story. It became another story altogether when Pierce sent him to the hydra, and that is one thing that Laura will never forgive the whole ridiculous building for.

‘Good afternoon,’ she replies, with a nod of her head.

Signor Vanni emerges from the shadows, with coffee and tea and sandwiches, and the aide does not know quite where to put his hands to keep them out of the way. Once Signor Vanni is gone, Laura helps herself to a sandwich, and shoves it in her mouth whole.

Clint has taught her well.

The aide picks at his preferred sandwich, and for a minute they sit in silence.

‘Your letter said you wished to discuss a performance by my children,’ Laura says, ‘at the May Fayre.’

‘Perhaps a dance,’ the aide says, ‘I see the maypole has been erected, perhaps they could learn a reel?’

‘I doubt it,’ Laura says, ‘there’s barely a right foot between them, never mind enough to go around.’

‘Oh. Then perhaps they could learn a play? Perhaps write one? Would you have time to teach them that?’

‘Perhaps,’ Laura says, because she’s taught most of them to read in such little time, teaching them to recite a few lines would be easy.

The aide flounders a little, obviously having not expected resistance. She wonders if he is resisted a lot, and can’t help herself.

‘Do you have a wife?’ she asks.

The aide blushes, and then clears his throat.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no, I am currently too engaged in my duties to engage in courtship.’

She hums, and helps herself to a cake.

‘What of you, may I ask? Have you found a husband yet?’

‘I’ve got my eye on a couple potential suitors,’ she says. ‘But I’ve no intention of marrying yet.’

‘Is that so?’ the aide asks, and shifts in his chair.

Laura’s eyes narrow, the smallest narrowing she can do without not doing it at all, and she squares her shoulders.

‘I have no fortune, you see,’ she says, ‘and no intention of giving up my freedom for domestic chores. You understand, of course. I am dedicated to my engagement with my students.’

‘I understand,’ the aide says, but it looks like he’s hearing something she hasn’t said.

They say nothing for a while, picking at sandwiches and drinking their tea.

‘The pageant is due this year, is it not?’ the aide asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura says, even though she knows very well that the pageant is due this year. ‘Is it?’

‘I believe so,’ the aide says, ‘I wondered if perhaps you might be attending?’

Laura snorts. ‘The pageant is for ladies of value, sir, and mine is not high enough.’

‘To some, perhaps not. But you are a very pretty lady. In the right dress, perhaps prettier than the rest.’

‘I have no interest in attending the pageant,’ Laura says, with a very unladylike snort. ‘Even if I had a dress to wear, parading about on a stage for the bachelors to ogle is not something I particularly find myself inclined to do.’

The aide is still looking at her like he’s hearing something she’s not saying, or seeing something she’s not aware of.

‘I think you should consider it,’ he says, ‘I think you could very well be May Queen, if you cleaned up your crumbs, anyway.’

Laura licks her mouth, just to further his point.

‘May Queen, indeed,’ she snorts to herself when he’s gone some half hour later. Signor Vanni comes to collect the plates and cups and accruements of the meeting, and sees her snorting to herself.

‘He is a pig,’ he says, ‘and pigs are full of shit.’

‘Mind your manners,’ she says, absently, and downs the last of her cup. ‘He said what he came to say, and I told him what he can do with it, and we won’t hear any more of it.’

Signor Vanni hums like he doesn’t believe her, and then gives a little cry when the door opens.

‘Mister Barton!’ he says, and his arms go wide, but Clint is not one to be hugged so freely, and so they merely clap hands together, several times in some exciting combination Laura thinks they make up on the spot. ‘You missed the pig.’

‘I know,’ he says, and helps himself to the vacated chair. ‘I waited for him to go. He looked very sour, I hope you didn’t upset him too much, I have some jobs lined up this week, I can’t camp outside your door.’

‘I’d never ask you to,’ Laura says, ‘I still have that skittle-pin from last year’s fayre by the door.’

‘I had noticed,’ Clint nods, because he’d tripped over it two weeks ago after Laura knocked it aside trying to jump away from his tickling fingers.

‘So I’m quite safe,’ she assures him.

He hums, and asks what the aide wanted.

‘He asked about the children, like I said he would. And he told me I should enter the pageant. Me, ha! I couldn’t care less. I have better things to be doing during the fayre than swan about in a pretty dress.’

The look she gives him is scorching, and he feels his ears burn.

‘Behave,’ he chides, and she smiles like an angel doing nothing wrong. ‘It wouldn’t be fair for you to enter, anyway, you’re much prettier than the society girls, and they’d only be jealous.’

Laura is not prettier than the society girls; her hands are rougher, and her skin darker, because she works, and doesn’t have time to sit about the place reading romance novels and eating cake.

‘You’re a flatterer, Mister Barton, and it shan’t get you anywhere,’ she snorts.

He smiles, and his foot brushes hers under the table.

‘I’ll walk you home,’ he says, ‘it’s getting late, and the scoundrels are sure to be about.’

‘Mm, I’m sure. And they might steal me away?’

Something flickers across his eyes, but it clears, and he doesn’t say what’s on his mind.

‘I’d never allow it,’ he says, with sincerity that makes her blush.

‘Come along, then,’ she says, ‘you’d best get me home before the rogues come out to play.’

The only rogue they see on the way home is a stray cat chasing some mice. Clint lingers at the doorway of her cottage for a few moments, and she tells him she’s teaching for most of the day tomorrow.

‘But I might have time for a stroll?’ she offers, ‘in the evening, maybe?’

‘I might be hunting,’ he says, ‘there’s word of something in the farmer’s fields, so I promised I’d take a look. Sam’s not seen anything, but my eyes are better.’

‘You just have less of them,’ she laughs, and touches his cheek. ‘Goodnight, Clint.’

‘Goodnight, honey.’

She smiles, and shuts the door in his face.


	2. The Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve puts one and two together, and gets five.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We meet the gang, and get to see some 4k Ultra HD Hawkvision (thanks dom)
> 
> Remember to r+r like it's 2008 hahaha my ego is fragile
> 
> Enjoy, my lovelies~!

Natasha is a little thing, small and lithe and prone to walking on the balls of her feet because she dances more than she walks. She’s a thorn in Clint’s rear end, but he loves her, in the way you might love a kitten that sleeps on your bed but attacks your toes when you roll over. Because that’s what Natasha is like, all soft and sweet and then she pounces and takes your throat out.

‘So,’ she says, leaping onto his back and nearly making him choke on his tongue, ‘when’s the wedding?’

He elbows her in the ribs, which dislodges her with about as much effect as it would a limpet from a rock; none at all. She settles herself against his shoulders, and she’s so _improper_ and it’s no wonder the ladies of the town all gossip about what a mess he’s making of Laura’s reputation with the way she carries on.

‘There isn’t one, now get down.’

‘There is,’ she protests, but obligingly gets down, because the fun’s only fun when he’s playing along. ‘Or there will be, when you grow the balls to ask her.’

‘Mind your manners,’ he says, and glances about himself before starting to walk, just to put some distance between the market stalls and her foul mouth.

‘You listen to her too much,’ Natasha says, as though she isn’t seventeen and too young to know better, ‘you used to be fun.’

‘Nat, please. I am still fun, I just don’t want to be tarred with the same brush as you.’

‘I’ve heard that mouth of yours,’ she snorts, and tries to trip him, but he hops over her foot. ‘You could have been a sailor, if you weren’t afraid of water.’

‘I’m not afraid of water,’ he says, ‘I’m afraid of drowning, as any sensible man should be.’

‘Bucky had his arm bitten off by a Hydra, and he’s not afraid of drowning.’

‘He’s afraid of most things,’ Clint corrects her, gently, because it’s not really his place to tell her that, ‘he’s just good at hiding it.’

She looks at him then, with something almost resembling contrition; teasing Bucky, and making light of what happened, it’s not something she actively tries to do.

‘I guess,’ she says, which is as close to an apology as she gets.

Laura talks, sometimes, of having massive amounts of respect for Natasha, and the way she lives her life, with her trousers and her brazen attitude of absolutely no cares for other’s concerns, and Clint respects her for it, too. Less, of course, because he gets the brunt of Natasha’s bold nature, but he respects that she’s seen what society offers girls in her standing, and has decided that it isn’t for her. Clint can’t afford that freedom, and he envies her for it.

‘Anyway,’ Natasha says, because the silence has dragged for a second longer than is comfortable. ‘I saw her meeting with some gremlin from the castle the other day, what was that about?’

‘The May Fayre,’ Clint says, with a roll of his eyes. ‘What else would it be about?’

They take a seat at the edge of the green, watching the maypole dancers practice their newest routine. It’s a different dance every year, and Clint is sure they’re starting to recycle them, because he’s sure he’s seen blue-over-green-past-brown before. Two of the gentlemen – loosely described as such – who are involved in the dancing get into a squabble over who’s ribbon goes over which. Natasha wants to stir trouble, and Clint carefully rests a hand on her shin to stop her.

‘Don’t,’ he says, ‘they don’t need it. They’re causing enough fuss by themselves.’

‘You really aren’t any fun,’ she snorts. ‘What do they want her to do for them this year? They’re always trying to get her to do something.’

‘They want the kids to do something, though if she manages to wrangle those punks into anything resembling order, she deserves to be mayor of this shithole.’

‘There he is,’ Natasha snorts, ‘I knew you were in there somewhere. So she’ll put on a play, or something, she’s good at getting them to play pretend. Tell her to make it a play about something fun, like knights or civil war, or a dramatic re-enactment of that time Steve pissed off Lady Kruger, and the stink that caused. Tell her to do that, Steve would think it was funny.’

‘Steve would,’ Clint agrees, ‘but I’d never hear the end of it from Bucky, or from Sam. They have even less sense of fun than me.’

Natasha shrugs. ‘They’d get over it. The May Fayre is dull as pig shit, and I need entertainment.’

‘There’s the tourney,’ he offers.

‘They don’t let me join in on that any more,’ she sniffs, turning her face away, but her ears are burning. ‘Not since I showed Mister Rumlow how to really put an axe in the target.’

‘Then eat fire,’ Clint replies, and winces as the two gentlemen begin to exchange blows.

‘Shouldn’t you stop them?’ Natasha asks, and Clint imagines she’d be eating grapes, if she had any to hand.

‘Nah.’

‘But who’ll fill their spaces if they break their noses? Surely not you, you haven’t got two feet to put together.’

‘Child,’ he says, which is about as close to chastising her as he gets, and even that isn’t very close, because she’s very quick to point out that she’s six months off being a _lady_. ‘If you are a Lady of any sort, then I’m Duke of York.’

The Duke of York is a prestigious enough title, if not a little prone to wandering. Then again, she supposes Clint does nothing but wander. Sure, he only wanders in about three directions – Laura’s cottage, Steve’s studio, and the coffee house owned by the ever-delightful Signor Vanni – but he still wanders.

‘You might be,’ she says, ‘your mother was someone, wasn’t she?’

‘She existed,’ Clint says, and his eyes tighten, so Natasha drops it.

‘Besides, you’ve got that fiddling to do on the night of the dance, you can’t do both.’

‘Who says? I can multitask.’

‘Clint, you can’t look both ways before you walk in front of a carriage, don’t tell me you can play and dance at the same time.’

They sit in silence for several minutes, quite content to just watch the men squabble and other men try to stop them, for a while unsuccessfully, but then gaining the upper hand and separating them before the lasses holding their mouths got too upset about it all.

‘Tell me something,’ Natasha says.

Clint hums.

‘When are you going to tell her how you feel?’

‘Who says I feel anything?’

‘You know someone’s going to make her a marriage proposal soon. Probably someone from the castle, and they’ll drag her up there to teach their little goblins how to read and write and you’ll never see her again, so I don’t know why you don’t tell her. Sure, you don’t have any money, ‘sides what you make from hunting and all that, but people like you, and they like her, and they all think it anyway. So you might as well just tell her, and make it official and then you can carry on with your lives as normal, only I won’t have to take her chickens that she throws out to the foxes because she forgets to eat if someone isn’t around, and I have better things to do than keep her alive for you to get on with it.’

‘Nat,’ Clint says, world-weary, and with his gaze to the bunny-tail clouds drifting above their heads. ‘Sometimes you need to learn to keep your nose out of other people’s business.’

He dusts himself off, and he walks away. He doesn’t often walk away from her, mostly because she follows, but sometimes, sometimes that’s just what you have to do. So it’s what he does, and to her credit, she doesn’t follow.

* * *

Steve is sick. Steve is always sick, but at least this time it’s just hayfever. It doesn’t stop him at all, doesn’t slow him down or make him reconsider, but he’s still sick, and Bucky is still chasing after him with handkerchiefs and cocoa (made to Laura’s recipe, but missing her touch).

‘I’m telling you, Buck,’ he says, marching off down Main Street like he’s not sneezing every few steps with his eyes streaming, ‘there’s something fishy going on.’

‘You always think there’s something fishy,’ Bucky snorts, and bumps into an old lady. ‘Sorry, ma’am. Just because something stinks don’t mean there’s shit.’

Steve looks over his shoulder at his oldest, dearest friend.

‘Bucky,’ he says, and stops marching, ‘you’re my oldest, my dearest friend. I love you, I do. But please. If it smells like shit, it probably is, just leave it be.’

‘Leave it to you, you mean.’

Steve shrugs, and off he goes again. Rolling his eyes, Bucky follows.

‘I mean it,’ Steve says a few minutes later, as they duck into the apothecary. ‘Something’s going on, and I’m _sure_ the pageant has something to do with it.’

‘You said that last time,’ Bucky says, ‘and nothing came of it.’

‘Or the year before, or the year before, and yet, who the _fuck_ has heard of Jenny Green since?’

‘Language!’ calls the assistant at the counter, and Steve’s ears colour, his fingers curling into his palms instead of jabbing at nothing in particular.

‘What do you think?’ he whispers, once they’ve gotten what they came for, and have retreated. ‘About what Clint said?’

‘He talks a lot, was I supposed to be listening?’

Steve huffs out a breath that might be a sigh, and shakes his head.

‘Useless.’

‘I only have one arm.’

‘Armless.’

‘That’s me.’

Steve takes a breath. He’s five-four and a bag of wet flour weighs more, and his hayfever is making his brain fuzzy, but he’s not _stupid_. He knows what he knows, and what he knows is that Bucky is deliberately antagonising him to distract him from what both Bucky and Sam consider a lunatic goose-chase of a nothing. So _what_ if Jenny Green went missing five years ago? So _what_ if Lauren O’Connell went missing five years before that? Girls go missing all the time. Miss Green was married to a courtier in the capital, and Miss O’Connell was a wild sort. Pretty, certainly, but wild.

‘They’ve asked Laura to do the pageant.’

‘Laura would rather die.’

‘I’m scared doing it will kill her.’

‘Kill who?’ Clint asks, and they leap a solid mile.

‘What? Who, nobody, that’s who.’

Clint, with a brace of chickens in one hand, and a tin of tea in the other, his eyebrows crooked and lips twisted in bemusement, stands there watching them.

‘How long have you been there?’ Bucky asks, which is about as suspect as Steve’s denial of anything at all.

‘Like, five seconds. Only heard the last thing, who were you talking about?’

The ever-classy comeback is on Steve’s tongue, Clint can see it, but Steve, like Clint, is an orphan, and implying that an orphan’s mother is – well, it’s a long-standing joke, and nobody is going to make it knowingly about a dead mother.

‘Nobody you know,’ Steve says, which sounds like half of a lie.

‘You’re getting better at bullshit, Mister Rogers, I’ll give you that,’ Clint snorts, and tosses the brace over his shoulders to free up a hand. ‘Laura said she’d do a roast, if you boys want feeding.’

Said boys exchange glances, and the glance tells an entire conversation in half a second. Clint has always been fascinated at how they can talk without words, and wonders if he’s so easy to read. Steve is saying that there is a conversation to be had, and Bucky is telling him to leave it, and in the end, as usual, Bucky wins out, if only because he has harder eyebrows.

‘Are you coming, or nah?’ Clint asks, gesturing over his shoulder with a thumb. ‘I gotta go fish Nat out of whatever trouble she’s in, so if you are, you know where Laura is. Sam’s already on his way.’

‘Oh, well if _Sam’s_ on his way,’ Steve snorts, and it sounds disgusting with all the snot, ‘I suppose we’d better run all the way there.’

‘Oink, oink,’ Clint replies, in that sort of way where he’s heard something they haven’t said.

‘What?’ Bucky asks, looking as confused as Steve feels.

‘Isn’t that what the pigs do?’ Clint asks, ‘they run all the way home, don’t they? The little pig.’

There’s a pause and then Bucky says, ‘yes.’

‘Okay, well, oink, oink, get running.’

And like that, he’s gone again, leaving the boys looking at each other with squints.

‘What the fuck is he eating?’ Steve asks.

‘You’d have to ask Laura, she’s the one that feeds him.’

They start walking, and Steve shrugs.

‘I don’t know, he lives with Mister Stark, and you know what he’s like.’

Bucky holds his hand up in defeat. ‘I ain’t gonna go there.’

Which is fair, because trying to unpack Tony Stark’s existence is something that would take many more days than they have free.

As ever, the doors of the cottage are open; Laura’s singing in the kitchen, and Sam is out in the garden, chattering to the birds in the apple tree at the end of the path. There’s some good smells coming from in the kitchen, and they duck into the cottage to say hello before going to Sam. Well, Steve goes out to Sam, Bucky stays in the kitchen to keep Laura company.

‘So,’ Steve says, by way of greeting, and Sam hums, still looking at the birds.

‘So,’ Sam replies. ‘What have you decided on causing a stir over today?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ Steve says, ‘but we have to stop Laura going into the pageant.’

‘Laura has no interest in the pageant, I don’t see the problem.’

‘She’ll go missing. The castle have been asking about it, and – ‘

‘Steve, for the love of God, the castle asks every young girl to go into the pageant, and Laura’s – well, she’s long overdue her pageant win. It’ll all just a song and dance to make girls feel pretty, and find them a husband. We can take bets all we like, but Clint isn’t going to open his mouth and propose any time soon, so why shouldn’t she get married to someone, even they are some snotty shitstain from the castle?’

‘Because she deserves her happiness,’ Steve says, and he clearly intends it not to be as loud as it is.

‘What happiness?’ Sam crows back, ‘Clint won’t take her hand, and she hasn’t got any security here. I ask the birds to keep an eye on her, and we can stop by every night of the week, but when things change, as they _always_ change, she won’t be able to get the money to support herself, and we manage, but Christ, she can’t live on our spare change. Let it go, Steve, just let it lie.’

Steve opens his mouth and flounders, but he can’t say anything. Never say something when you’re mad, his mother always said. You can take it back, but you can’t undo it. Keep it shut until you can say it with a clear head.

So he says nothing, even though he wants to say that Sam isn’t _listening_ to what he’s saying.

‘Alright,’ he says, in the end, because he has to say something. ‘Sure. I’ll let it lie. She’ll go missing, and Clint will go spare, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘Steve.’

‘Sure thing.’

And off he goes, stomping back along the stepping stone path to the kitchen, where Bucky is pinching bits out of a bowl and shoving them into his mouth whenever Laura’s back is turned.

‘You’re a little shit,’ Steve says.

‘Says you,’ Bucky snorts back.

‘I know what he’s doing,’ Laura hums over her shoulder, ‘and I’ll just put less on his plate when I get to it.’

Bucky flicks a pea at the back of her head.

‘What a waste of a pea,’ Laura sighs.

She’s just dishing up when Clint and Natasha appear. Clint has a bloody nose, and Laura waves a wooden spoon at him.

‘Go and wash your face, young man,’ she tells him, ‘I’m not having any more blood on this tablecloth.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replies, and off he scuttles to the wash basin, scrubbing his face hard enough to make himself snort.

Natasha climbs into the chair left spare at Sam’s right, and she offers him a smile, before leaping into a conversation about some nonsense she saw in the preparations for the May Fayre.

‘It looks like there’s going to be some nice stalls this year. There’s already some fabric sellers setting up, for the girls that want new dresses.’

‘The pageant is getting a bigger thing,’ Bucky shrugs, and takes one of the plates from Laura’s hand to pass it down the table, ‘the girls do nothing but talk about it on that bench outside the tavern, you know, where they sit and watch those dickhead hunter types go swanning by? Rumlow and that lot.’

‘He’s a shit hunter,’ Clint snorts, taking the empty seat next to the head of the table, where Laura always sits.

‘Can we not have bad language at the table?’ Laura asks, handing out two more plates, ‘please, for five minutes.’

‘Sorry, Laura,’ the boys chime.

‘Not sorry,’ Natasha chimes, and Laura laughs.

‘Just eat your dinner, you heathens,’ she chuckles, and they raise their glasses.

* * *

Clint, as always, stays later than the rest, hovering about until Natasha’s disappeared over the bridge, her voice fading as she hollers after Sam and Bucky, teasing about Steve.

‘They’re a good bunch,’ Laura says, and Clint hums, leans against the door until she finally decides to move away from the porch.

‘They’ll do,’ he snorts, and follows her back into the kitchen. ‘Listen, what they were saying about the pageant.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Laura assures him, hand warm on his bare arm. ‘I won’t be doing it, regardless of what the castle says. I don’t want to get on a stage and start singing and dancing and talking about my dreams for the future. I don’t have any, for a start. I just want to get through the next day, never mind save the village from some monster or another. I’ll leave that to the heroes. Help me with the dishes?’

‘You gonna pay me, Miss Harcourt?’ he snickers, and pinches at her hips as he moves around the table to get to the stove to boil some water.

‘Mm, maybe,’ she agrees, and turns her head so their noses brush. Her breath is warm against his lips. ‘Depends on whether you do a good job, Mister Barton.’

‘Mister Barton,’ he snorts, ‘nobody’s called me that for anything good in years.’

‘Then maybe you should start doing good, hm? Something to think about when you walk home.’

‘Who says I’m walking?’

She snorts. ‘What are you going to do? Fly? You’re silly.’

‘I do my best,’ he shrugs.

* * *

It takes him a long time to leave. Laura keeps finding jobs for him to do, and for a while, they sit on the steps with cocoa and look out over the sun going behind the trees, and the moon replacing her brother.

‘You should go,’ she murmurs eventually, with a heavy yawn. ‘They’ll be wondering if we’re up to no good.’

‘I’m sure they already were,’ he snorts, and runs a hand over her head. ‘You get some sleep, Miss Harcourt, you’ve got the punks tomorrow.’

‘Yessir,’ she hums, and takes his hand to get to her feet.

He leaves her not long after, mouth warm with the cocoa on her lips, and he pauses, halfway down the path, listens to the silence. There are no birds, no bats, no anything to break the silence.

‘What’s up there?’ he asks into that silence. ‘What are you seeing?’

But nothing answers, because nothing is there to answer, and so he heads back to his room on the Stark estate, and he lies awake for some hours, staring at the ceiling and trying to think of ways to get Laura’s favour at the May Fayre.

* * *

A shadow begins to move behind the clouds. It’s large, and slow, and dark, but the birds don’t really have the words to describe what they see, cannot explain it. They tell Sam, but Sam doesn’t understand.

Nobody ever understands until it’s too late, and a hawk sits atop the cottage at the edge of the town, where the pretty teacher woman sings songs as she dresses. It sits there and it watches the clouds, and it hopes she does not wear a pretty dress. Well, it supposes, as it watches the shadow creep closer, and the pretty teacher woman continues to sing a song about being a king, she could wear a pretty dress, just so long as its not that colour that other girl wore, the one that looked like that bird across the way, the irritating one that kept diving out of nowhere with its wings tucked like a _savage_.

The smaller the bird, the smaller the brain, it thinks, ruffling its feathers. It needs to talk to Wilson, but Wilson doesn’t _listen_.

None of them _ever_ listen.

* * *

In the morning, it rains. It’s a soft rain, gentle and pattering against the cobbles and the glass and the rooftops of the carriages pulling into the town square. Laura and Natasha are there, huddled together under a canopy of a fabric stall, gossiping about materials with which Natasha could make some dresses. Laura can make passable dresses, but Natasha can make _gowns_, and that’s a whole different kettle of fish.

‘I think that would be pretty,’ Natasha says, pointing at a deep red.

‘I like this,’ Laura replies, fingers soft against some deep plum cotton.

‘It’s cotton.’

‘And?’

‘Excuse me,’ says a voice from behind them. ‘I’m looking for the castle, perhaps you might direct me?’

Both girls’ lips curl.

‘Rumlow,’ Natasha grunts, and refuses to turn.

Laura turns enough to look at him, but not enough to engage.

‘You know how best to get to the castle, Mister Rumlow,’ she snorts. ‘You have been there many more times than we have, and we are still miles away.’

‘Perhaps. But a pretty guide would never go amiss.’

‘Goodbye, Mister Rumlow. Perhaps you could ask some of the girls by the tavern, they’re always eager to show castle aides about the place.’

‘The preparations for the Fayre are coming along,’ he says, and his elbows are hanging out of the window.

‘Goodbye, Mister Rumlow,’ Laura repeats.

Natasha grabs her elbow and drags her away. They’re drenched in moments, trying to pick their way through the stalls to get as far away as possible.

‘Prick,’ Natasha grunts, when the carriages have moved on.

‘He’s not so bad,’ Laura shrugs. ‘He’s just got a very high opinion of himself, they all do.’

Natasha looks at her from the corner of her eye, and pulls a face.

‘High opinion, sure.’

Laura rolls her eyes, and takes Natasha’s elbow. ‘Come on, let’s get some tea.’

Clint is there, the way that Clint can usually be found at Signor Vanni’s, leaning on the counter with his one leg bent, and if Laura looks at the vague shape of his arse, half-hidden behind the drape of his coat, well, he shouldn’t have it sticking out like that, then. He’s waving a hand about, obviously very much enjoying the conversation, and Laura stops for half a second, halfway through the door.

‘Ah!’ Signor Vanni cries, ‘Miss Harcourt! Miss Romanov! You came!’

He says it like they were invited, but not expected, and Laura supposes, as he rushes around the counter to sweep them both up, that it is the way of things. They have a standing invitation to come by any time they like, but he does not begrudge their lives, their busy natures.

‘Laura,’ Clint says, straightening, and he has a smile he quickly bites back behind his teeth before anyone can really get an accusation in. ‘Nat, good to see you. Have you been out there long? You’re soaked through.’

Natasha waves a hand and takes her coat off; Signor Vanni takes it to hang it up, but Clint beats him to Laura’s, already has he halfway out of it before Natasha’s done.

‘We were doing alright ‘til Rumlow showed his ugly face.’

‘Rumlow?’

‘Mister Rumlow was looking for directions to the castle,’ Laura explains, laying a gentle hand on Clint’s arm. ‘You know how those boys get, they always want a pretty guide.’

‘Pretty guide,’ Signor Vanni snorts. ‘Of course. You girls take a seat, I’ll bring tea through. You want sandwiches? Proper ones. Not those fuckin’ cucumbers.’

Laura raises her eyebrows, but Signor Vanni ignores her.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘please.’

‘No pig,’ he says, waving a finger at her.

‘No pig,’ she replies with a nod, and blinks when Clint echoes her at the same time.

‘What?’ he shrugs. ‘You don’t do pig.’

She gives him a look, like he’s lost the little sense he has (which is entirely possible), and takes the seat he pulls out for her.

‘So Rumlow’s sniffing about the town, then?’ he asks, dragging a chair across to their table as Natasha makes herself comfortable in the other one, looking out of the window at the street.

Clint’s ankle brushes up against Laura’s, and her lips twitch, but she isn’t looking at him, doesn’t dare.

‘He’s obviously looking for some involvement in the pageant,’ she says, ‘or trying to seek out a favour for the tourney. You are taking part, aren’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Clint nods. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’ve got to show up those cowards at the castle, anyway. Think they’re better than everyone, not a chance.’

‘They’re not the worst,’ Laura says, and Clint flicks her nose.

‘They’re worse than me, and that’s all they need to be. Especially that guard, whatever his name is. That Dexter boy.’

Clint says boy the way one might talk of shit on the floor, which is especially rich considering he acts like a child more often than not.

‘The one that came a very close second?’ Natasha asks from under her eyelashes, like she’s not goading him.

Clint scowls, but doesn’t get to react; tea and good, decent sandwiches (with no pig in sight) have arrived, and they fall into a comfortable silence, looking at the rain or at each other as surreptitiously as possible.

‘I’d better get back,’ Laura says when she’s done, and the silence has dragged. ‘I have to meet with the twins later, to help them draft a letter of complaint to that barony on the other side of the mountain.’

‘Why?’ Natasha asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura says, and spreads her palms in resignation. ‘They’ve been talking to Steve, so you’d have to ask him.’

Clint rolls his eyes. ‘He’s a pain in my neck.’

‘Yours?’ Laura scoffs, ‘you wait until winter, Mister Barton, you wait. He’ll be a pain in my neck more than anyone’s. At least I have logs for a fire.’

‘Come on, Miss Log Fire,’ he grins, getting to his feet, ‘I’d better get you back.’

‘She can walk herself home,’ Natasha says from behind her teacup, slurping loudly.

Clint waits until Laura is looking at her coat sleeve to stick two fingers up.

‘Laura, control your man!’ Natasha crows, and points a finger.

‘Children,’ Laura snorts, and gets her coat on. ‘Come on, then, you’ll have to keep up.’

‘I have longer legs,’ Clint says as they walk to the door.

Signor Vanni comes by a moment later to start clearing the table.

‘Have they announced the engagement yet?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Natasha sighs, ‘no fat stack of coin for you yet.’

Signor Vanni sighs, and takes the tray of plates and cups away.

* * *

A few days later, Mister Fury, who runs most of the guards, when they care to listen to him, is sat by the fountain, and Steve comes to sit next to him, sketchbook in hand. It’s innocent enough; Mister Fury often sits by the fountain on his day off, and he has a book in his hand, and pays no attention to the Rogers boy when he sits down in a clatter of pastels and pencils.

‘Sir,’ Steve nods.

‘Rogers,’ Fury nods back, but doesn’t look away from his book.

‘Miss David says that she still hasn’t heard from Jenny Green. And she says that her cousin hasn’t heard from Margaret Johnson either. I just – I know it’s connected, but I don’t know how.’

Mister Fury doesn’t reply for a few minutes, just looks at his book. He turns a page. Steve pulls out a couple of pastels, and begins to sketch the scene in wide swipes of blue and stone brown.

‘Have you spoken to Miss Harcourt, yet?’ he asks.

‘About what?’

‘The pageant.’

‘Oh. No, Bucky won’t let me bring it up. She says that she won’t do it.’

‘She’s a good girl,’ Mister Fury nods. ‘Make sure she sticks to her word. I know she will, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.’

Steve pauses, dotting in a little bit of green where the ivy goes up a building.

‘Sir,’ he starts, and then stops.

Mister Fury waits him out.

‘Sir,’ he starts again, clearing his throat. He blows his nose. ‘The pageant, it’s – the girls go, but _where_?’

‘Rogers,’ Mister Fury says, ‘you know I can’t answer that. I would in a heartbeat, if I thought it would help. But there’s nothing we can do about it. You saw what the Hydra did, do you not think we’d have stopped it, if we could?’

Steve flounders for a moment, hands and mouth moving, expression cycling before settling on disbelief.

‘Just _tell_ me what it is? Are they – are they being eaten?’

‘You should stop associating with Barton,’ Mister Fury says, ‘he’s giving you all sorts of ideas.’

But there’s something in his eye, the one he has left, since the Hydra took the other. And Steve looks at him, and he sees it. He doesn’t know what it is, but he sees it. The answer to the question he doesn’t know how to ask.

‘Yessir,’ he nods. ‘I’ll let him know he’s full of shit.’

Mister Fury snorts. ‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.’

They sit there quietly for another hour or so. Sam comes by, sits with them during his scant free moments before his next errand, and then he’s gone and they’re back to being alone. They don’t speak of the pageant again. They don’t need to.

Steve goes to see Laura later. There’s still the better part of a month before the May Fayre, but Laura has some fabric samples on her kitchen table.

‘Just because I’m not in the pageant doesn’t mean I can’t wear a nice dress,’ she tells him, passing over a cup of cocoa. ‘It’s nice to have a new thing every now and then.’

‘I suppose so,’ Steve says, but something about a new dress doesn’t sit right. ‘Does Clint know?’

Laura flushes, high in her cheeks and all the way down her neck.

‘It’s none of his business,’ she tells him.

Steve hums. ‘Sure.’

‘I mean it,’ she says, ‘it’s none of his business. I can have a dress made if I like, and it doesn’t matter what he thinks, it’s not for him.’

‘Of course not. Laura, I’m not judging, you know I just care that you’re happy.’

She harrumphs like a child. He grins at her. She grins back.

Steve looks at the colours of the fabric, while she goes to the kitchen door to throw the scraps out for the chickens. There’s a deep red and an emerald green and a sea blue and a pretty plum purple, and he finds himself touching the purple, feeling the softness of it under his fingertips. She’ll go for the purple, he’s sure, because it’s Clint’s favourite colour, in the silly way she does a lot of things for him without really realising what it is she’s doing. He supposes he’s not much different; he does so many things with Bucky in mind, even when he’s not really thinking about the one-armed stupid jerk.

But she’s going to cost him a few dollars at this rate.

‘Are you going to tell him?’ he asks.

‘What is it with you lot?’ she snorts. ‘You just can’t help yourselves. Nat’s been on my case, and Bucky too, do you have a bet or something?’

‘No,’ Steve says, ‘you think we’ve got enough money for a bet?’

‘You’re a terrible liar, Steve Rogers, the _worst_.’

He shrugs. ‘It’s a gift.’

‘That’s one word for it, sure.’

‘I’d better get home,’ he says, and looks at that fabric again. ‘Before it gets too dark.’

‘Are you alright to get home?’ she asks, ‘I can walk halfway with you.’

‘I’ll be alright,’ he assures her, ‘it’s not like there’s an ogre under the bridge.’

She laughs, and tells him not to tempt fate.

‘Go on, then,’ she says, giving him a gentle hug and a kiss on the cheek, ‘get home before Bucky comes looking for you, I don’t need to be accused of kidnap again.’

‘Again,’ Steve sniffs, ‘you’d think I was a child.’

‘Maybe if you acted your age?’

‘That’s for cowards and boring people.’

And with that, goodbyes are said, and Steve goes on his way. He passes Clint and Sam, talking in low tones and looking grim, but they don’t seem to notice him, so he doesn’t interrupt, although he wants to warn Clint that Laura’s getting a new dress. Let it be a surprise, it might provoke the fool into proposing.

When he gets home, Bucky looks at him askance.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, but Steve just shakes his head.

‘It’s nothing, not really. I’m just. Over thinking.’

‘Don’t you always. Let it rest for now; it’ll wait for morning, and you’ll look at it in the light of day and realise it was nothing to be worried about.’

Steve doesn’t know how to put the certainty that he feels into words, not yet anyway. It’s there, he can feel it under his skin, but he doesn’t have the words.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I think it is. I don’t know.’

‘Sleep on it.’

‘Yeah, sure. Goodnight, Buck.’

‘Sleep well, punk.’

* * *

Laura has a nightmare. It isn’t often she has a nightmare. But she has one, of something dark and looming and hovering just out of sight. It’s oppressive, it’s heavy, weighing on her shoulders like the jaws of a dog clamped tight.

She wakes with a cold sweat to a hawk screeching and someone banging on her door. It’s dark outside, and she doesn’t recognise the knock.

‘Uh,’ she says, to the ceiling, and swings herself out of bed.

The hawk is still screaming.

‘Coming!’ she calls, gets her robe, finger-combs her hair, and heads downstairs to get the door.


	3. Interest and Intent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony gets a visitor. Clint makes a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some non-explicit sexual contact in the first section, go to the first page break if you need to.
> 
> Otherwise, enjoy my lovelies~!

It’s hammering with rain, and the hawk is shrieking, and Laura doesn’t know what to expect when she opens the door, still jittery from the nightmare.

‘Clint?’ she exclaims, and jerks back when he staggers through the door. ‘Oh, are you hurt? Where, show me.’

‘Just bruised,’ he promises, but he’s clutching his ribs. ‘Just bruised. Some troll out by the mines, you know how it is.’

She shuts the door and rushes to light the lantern on the side.

‘Let me at least look,’ she says, as she fumbles with the matches, ‘what were you doing going after a troll in the middle of the night?’

He takes them from her hands, lights one effortlessly, and guides it to the lantern. The low light it gives, behind them as it is, casts half of her face into shadow and he stands there for a second, too close and not close enough.

‘Oh,’ he says, realising that he hadn’t answered. ‘You know. Takes a whole day to track them, and they know how to wait you out.’

‘You should have told me you were going after a troll.’

‘It’s fine. I’m not broken or really hurt. Just took a fall when it threw a tree at me.’

‘Clint!’ she exclaims, but by then he’s got his faculties back and he’s got her face in his hands and he’s kissing her.

She thumps his chest once, but she’s kissing him back, so it’s a weak argument.

‘I love you,’ she says, quiet, against his mouth.

His arms are bare, the way they’re always bare, and she can feel the goosebumps ripple across his skin as the smile overtakes his mouth, breaks the kiss.

‘I love you, too,’ he breathes, ‘I love you so much.’

‘Come on,’ she whispers, and his eyes are like fire in the low light. ‘I’ll get the fire lit, and get a bath on the go.’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘Sure I do. The water will be good for the pain.’

‘And you get to see me naked?’

It comes out quick, and they both freeze. Her face is hot under his hands, and she laughs, just once or twice, awkward and nervous.

‘Well, if you’re offering. I mean, I didn’t really get a good look when we – ‘

‘Well, nothing really – I mean – it wasn’t really about looking – we just – I mean, we stopped before anything – ‘

‘Clint?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I was there, you don’t have to explain it to me.’

He licks his lips, swallows. Doesn’t tell her that he’s seen her naked since. Accidentally, of course. His timing needs some work, is all. He comes by at weird times, and catches her off-guard, but he’s so light on his feet she doesn’t realise it half the time.

‘A bath sounds good,’ he says instead, and Laura kisses his mouth again, soft, and his breath is shaky.

It’s hard to let go of her so that she can go and light the fire, and he can’t help but think about how he knows what’s behind her robe; the thinnest nightgown, and very little else. He stands there, and thinks a little bit too much about how much he really rather likes her, and when she comes back, he takes her hands, pulls her in again.

‘Hello,’ she laughs, cut off by his mouth.

‘Laura,’ he breathes, when he finally takes his mouth back.

She looks at him, fingertips tracing the shapes of his face, and his fingers curl against her hips. He looks at her, and she looks at him, and she licks her lips.

‘Yeah,’ she whispers, nods. ‘Yeah.’

It’s not the first time they’ve come this close to being very improper indeed. Her father had died a couple years prior, and the anniversary had caught her by surprise. She’d known it was coming, of course. But she’d been busy, and she’d been feeling alright, and so the sadness that had swept over her had caught her by surprise. He hadn’t known what to do, and things had just, spiralled. One kiss had become several, fingertips had traced shapes, and clothes had been moved, and it was only the shake of her head, noses brushing, her fingers curled tight in the back of his neck that kept them away from ruining either of their reputations.

They hadn’t shied away from what their instincts had told them, though, hadn’t shied away from the warmth of his fingers or the softness of her palm, and they’ve never really talked about it. It had been a dark night, dark and cold, but at least not lonely. They haven’t got to that point since, very resolutely keeping hands in safe places, but she’s pulling the knot of her robe and he’s backing her against the nearest surface, and neither of them say anything.

Her nose brushes his, a soft shake of her head, and he nods, buries his face in her neck as they fight with the robe to get it off her shoulders, and she smells of soap and her perfume, and he wonders if one day he’ll smell her skin for the last time, whether it might be soon.

They don’t say anything else, just breathe each other’s air, and he does his best to catch her sighs and her gasps, and she swallows the giddy noise he makes when she finally gets his britches open.

‘You,’ she says, sometimes later, when she has the bath run and the water hot and has gotten him into it, ‘are going to ruin me one of these days.’

‘Only if you want me to,’ he replies, and her smile is almost enough to ruin him.

The bruising isn’t the worst he’s had, but she doesn’t understand why he had to hammer on her door like that.

‘It’s raining,’ he says with a shrug that makes him wince. ‘What do you expect me to do? Stay out in the cold and the wet?’

‘When the hot and wet is better?’ she quips, and then flushes. ‘I don’t mean like – take that look off your face, Mister Barton, else I’ll turf you out with nothing on your backside.’

He laughs and pulls her in. ‘Like to see you try,’ he grins against her mouth. ‘You haven’t got the guts.’

‘No?’ she asks, and slaps a palm into the water, splashing him up the nose.

Leaving him to gag, she laughs her way up to the bathroom to get a towel.

She doesn’t think about the nightmare until after he’s gone, and the rain has eased, and the silence begins to get to her. She doesn’t really remember it, but she touches the warm skin on her neck where Clint’s kisses had burned holes, and she thinks it’s probably for the best.

* * *

It isn’t often that Clint sees Tony in the morning; for the most part, the gentleman – an arguable title, because Tony is a law unto himself – is a night owl. He’s up late, wakes later, and Clint is long gone before his curtains twitch. It isn’t just Tony that he misses in the morning, because whilst Miss Potts is up and about early, Clint is awake at dawn, and goes as she’s finishing her dressing routine, so it’s a rare occasion they cross paths.

So seeing Tony in the kitchen when Clint comes in to get his breakfast is something worth pausing over.

‘The hell are you doing awake?’ Clint finds himself asking, as though he has any right to speak like that, especially given that he’s not been to sleep himself yet.

Tony, eyeballing two apples like they might be poisoned – and in this town, it’s highly likely someone’s up to that kind of nonsense – glances across the kitchen at him.

‘I’ve been up all night,’ Tony tells him, ‘trying to get what I had planned for the day done so that I can get this whatever done.’

At “whatever,” he waves his hand, dismissive, like he can’t be bothered to find the word to describe it. The sun’s only halfway over the horizon, and Tony isn’t inclined to do any deep vocabulary searching at the best of times.

‘Whatever,’ Clint repeats, and rounds the table to go to the fruit bowl himself. ‘What’s whatever?’

‘Some crony,’ Tony replies, and drops himself into a chair at the table, having finally chosen the apple he wants, and put the other back. Clint doesn’t choose that one. ‘From the castle.’

‘The castle? The hell they want this time? Not more May Fayre shit? They’ve got everything set up now.’

‘Nah, looking for information on a girl.’

Clint wrinkles his nose, and leans against the counter. ‘They’re nosy bastards. I hope you told him to jog on.’

‘It’ll entertain me,’ Tony shrugs. ‘For a while, and you know I won’t give them anything they can use. I just like seeing the lengths they go to. They think they can buy me.’

Clint’s lip curls in disbelief. ‘I suppose we know the girl?’

‘Your Miss Harcourt,’ Tony says, and the look in his eyes would be sly, if it wasn’t so tired.

‘What?’

It comes out sharper than he means it to, and Tony raises an eyebrow. Clint clears his throat.

‘She’s not mine. And besides, she’s already agreed to do something about the Fayre with the kids, there’s not a lot else they can want from her. She won’t do the pageant.’

‘I think he’s quite taken with her. You know how these castle types get. Acknowledging them only makes it worse, and your Miss Harcourt can’t let anyone be, even when she doesn’t think there’s anything in it.’

‘She’s not mine,’ Clint repeats, tight between his teeth.

‘Are you sure about that? Oh, would you look at the time, he’ll be here in a half-hour, and I have lots to get on with before then.’

As he leaps from the table, half of his apple still on the table, Clint chews the back of his lip.

‘Who’s coming?’ he asks, unable to help himself.

Over his shoulder, Tony says, ‘Oh, I don’t know, Mister R-something. I can’t say I listened too closely.’

‘Rumlow?’ Clint asks, but Tony just shrugs and off he goes.

Clint considers this. He considers what Rumlow might want to know about Laura, and he doesn’t know why he bothers, because there’s only two questions he’ll want to ask.

Is Laura married? No.

Is she engaged? Also no.

Which means that she’s fair game. Rumlow could ask, and Laura would be a fool to say no. She would, of course, because that’s Laura’s way, but she’d be a fool. Rumlow’s part of the castle staff, and that gives him much more to offer than anyone else who might be interested in asking he can offer. He has a station, and a house, and money, and what amount to friends. He’s in a good position to offer marriage. He’d be a decent husband, at least. He might even be a good husband. He’d certainly be able to keep her safe, and comfortable, and probably give her a couple good strapping young boys with good bones and strong manly natures. They’d go hunting for sport with their father, and they’d grow up to be pillars of the community, and she could do worse. She could do a lot worse.

‘Fuck,’ he says, and shoves his own apple in his mouth.

He’ll ride out of town today, he thinks, go see about that rumour of trouble down by the river. Probably just some kelpies. He knows there’s been some will-o’-wisps floating about lately, heading in towards Gallows Hill, but they always gravitate there, and he’s not about to tell them to leave. Sure, he’s just got back into town after dealing with that troll by the mines, but someone’s got to deal with it, and Sam can only deal with so much. He’s spent a lot of time pratting about in town and with Laura lately, he needs to earn some coin, get back into the good books of the community. Maybe earn enough to -

‘Fuck!’ he says again, emphatic this time.

Pushing a hard breath out between his teeth, he stomps out the kitchen and off to the stables.

‘There is no point getting upset about it,’ he tells the horse as he yanks the saddle off the wall. ‘She’ll do what she does, and she’s not going to marry him, he’s no good for her.’

The horse whinnies, and he scowls.

‘Keep that shit to yourself,’ he tells it, and the horse snorts, but obligingly angles itself to accept the saddle.

* * *

Naturally, the first thing Tony does once Rumlow’s gone, with no more information than he came with, is go straight to Laura’s cottage. Well, actually, he goes to find Steve, to make sure that he’s not wasting his time by going to Laura’s cottage. Steve, naturally, wants to know why Tony has such an urgent appointment with their Miss Harcourt, and insists on tagging along, and Tony didn’t really want to have an audience for it all.

But that’s what you get for talking, he supposes.

‘I can’t believe the gall of him!’ Steve is still crowing, as they stroll (march) across the bridge to get to Laura’s cottage. ‘How dare he!’

‘Alright,’ Bucky says, with the put-upon tone of a tired man. ‘Calm down, you’ll make yourself sicker than before, and where will we be then? Nowhere, that’s where.’

‘That, and I’m tired of listening to it,’ Tony adds.

‘Boys!’ Laura calls from the end of the garden, where she’s pegging sheets on the line. ‘I didn’t expect to see you today!’ A pause of one second, two, and then she adds, ‘no Clint? Or Sam?’

‘Off doing their jobs,’ Tony says, ‘from what your Mister Barton was telling me.’

Laura’s ears colour, but she’s not as quick with the denial as Clint was.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, come in, I’ll put some tea on.’

They obligingly traipse inside, and Laura meets them from the kitchen door.

‘So,’ she says, lighting the stove and putting the kettle on, ‘what do I owe this pleasure to? It’s been a while since I’ve seen you out and about, Mister Stark.’

‘Tony, please, you’ve known me long enough. I – I had an interesting visitor this morning.’

‘Oh?’

‘That beast, Rumlow,’ Steve blurts out, and Laura’s nose wrinkles.

‘What does he want?’ she asks.

Tony, settling in his chair, leaning on the back of it like the savage he is, watches her for a second.

‘He seems to be interested, and quite intent, on asking for your hand.’

She scoffs. It sounds more like a choke than a laugh, and Tony can’t blame her.

‘I have no interest or intent on marrying him.’

‘Oh, good,’ Tony sighs, ‘I should have hated to give him the wrong impression. I told him that I was under the impression you were promised to someone else, but that even if that had changed, I should imagine you were in no mind to consider him a suitor.’

‘I’m not promised to anyone,’ Laura says, with visible confusion on her nose, ‘but you’re right. I shouldn’t have any mind to hear his proposal, even if he were the sort of man I might consider.’

‘What sort of man would you consider?’ Tony asks, and Laura’s cheeks colour, so she whirls around to get the tea sorted.

An audible thump, and she glances back to see Tony rubbing his shin, Steve scowling.

‘Listen,’ she says, and takes the tray of cups across to the table. ‘I know what you all think, and – I am – fond – of Clint. You know me well enough to know that. He’s been with me for – since before I came to be alone in this house. I am fond of him. He’s my best friend. But. He is not so sweet on me to make an offer like that.’

Her ears are _red_, like a fresh fire in the hearth of her heart, and the three boys at her table all give her the same disbelieving look.

‘You keep those looks to yourselves,’ she snipes, and turns back to get the milk.

A few moments of awkward silence follow, as she collects herself and joins them at the table.

‘Thank you for telling me, I shall make sure to discourage any attempts to get my attention from Mister Rumlow,’ she says, ‘and I shall make sure that I have no reason to be alone with him, no matter what reason he might give.’

‘I don’t think he’d – hurt you,’ Bucky says, and Laura knows that look.

‘I have no doubt you’re right,’ she agrees. ‘But he might get the impression I enjoy his company, and I should hate for him to think that.’

‘Clint knows,’ Tony says, and Laura heaves a sigh.

‘Why would you tell him?’ she asks.

‘He’s your best friend,’ Tony says, like he doesn’t understand the issue. ‘And he lives under my roof. Surely, as your friend, he should like to see you happily wed?’

Bucky pinches his nose, gives Steve a look.

‘Tony,’ he says, stiffly. ‘I do believe you aren’t helping.’

Tony spreads his hands. ‘He should know she has options.’

‘Rumlow is not an option,’ Steve barks.

‘He’s as good an option as any,’ Tony shrugs, ‘it’s not like Barton’s going to open his mouth now, is it?’

‘We’re just friends,’ Laura interjects, but the boys are getting into it, and ignore her.

‘It’s not that easy to just ask someone to marry you!’ Steve exclaims, and is halfway to his feet before Bucky grabs his arm. ‘Especially not when you’re living in someone else’s house!’

‘How do you think most people get married? Children live in their parents’ houses until they’re married, and then they get their own properties.’

‘In your world, maybe! But we don’t have that luxury, Tony! We don’t have estates to make dowries from or money to throw at the problem!’

‘Boys,’ Laura says, but continues to be ignored.

‘He’d marry her in a heartbeat,’ Steve continues, louder still. ‘If he thought he could, he’d marry her by the end of the day! But it’s not that easy.’

‘If he loves her, it would be that easy.’

‘Get out of my house!’

They stop, and stare. Steve is panting. Laura is on her feet, palms slammed to the table. The sugar spoon has toppled and spilled sugar across the table top.

Bucky sighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘Just get them out of my house,’ she says, and turns away from them, stomping to the kitchen door and out through it into the garden.

They sit there for several seconds and stare at each other. A rumble, and then it starts to rain.

‘Good job,’ Bucky says, and gets to his feet, dragging Steve by the sleeve of his shirt.

He tosses him outside and tells him to walk home by himself.

‘If you two want to fight, do it in the street like men, not at her kitchen table. You forget yourselves.’

He even slams the door on their heels, just to further emphasise the point.

After watching them walk – and squabble – their way off the property and onto the road, he goes through to the kitchen and out into the garden.

It’s cold, and it’s wet, and he’s shivering by the time he reaches the well, but Laura’s there, huddled up against the frame, staring at nothing. Her shoulders are shaking, and he’s not stupid.

‘They’re gone,’ he says, and she nods, wipes her eyes on her hand.

Bucky doesn’t carry a handkerchief, so he can’t really help, but he sits next to her anyway, dangles his legs into the well.

‘Watch you don’t fall in,’ she sniffles, ‘Dad’s not here to help if you lose the other arm.’

‘Take it,’ Bucky snorts, ‘then I don’t have to try and control Steve anymore.’

She sniffles, but it sounds like a chuckle, so he considers it a victory.

‘It’s weird,’ he says, ‘water’s such a not-a-problem. I can’t go near the lake. I know the Hydra’s gone, but I can’t even look at it without my back going tight. But rain and the wells and the river. I don’t mind it.’

‘Water is the source of life,’ Laura supposes.

‘Maybe so. Maybe it means I’m getting better.’

‘I like hearing you say that.’

They fall silent for a couple of minutes, and just lean against each other. Bucky rests his hand on Laura’s knee, and she rests her head on his shoulder, and it’s alright, for a minute.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘about those two.’

‘They can’t resist,’ she says, ‘it’s why I was so surprised to see them together.’

‘Stark just wanted to make sure that you were at home, but then he told Steve why he wanted to see you, and well. You know Steve.’

‘Maybe I should marry Mister Rumlow.’

It comes as a surprise to them both; they jerk upright, and stare at each other.

‘Why the fuck would you say something like that?’ Bucky asks.

‘Because maybe Tony has a point,’ she says, and looks at her fingers, fumbling with the hem of her apron. ‘Maybe. Mister Rumlow isn’t a _bad_ man. He’s not particularly nice, or clever, or funny. But he’s not bad. He’d – well, I’d not have to wonder if I can pay my way, or whether I’d have work, or anything like that. And I’d still be able to spend time with my friends, and I’d – Dad wouldn’t be happy, but he wouldn’t be cross with me. He’d understand. Mister Rumlow’s got a position, and I could do worse.’

‘And what about Clint?’

Her ears burn. ‘We’re just friends, Buck. It’s none of his business.’

‘Laura. _Laura_. I was not born yesterday, please don’t insult me, else I’ll jump down the well. You’re in love with him.’

‘And so what?’ she snorts. ‘I’ve been in love with him since the first time I saw him, and I’m always going to love him, and marrying Mister Rumlow wouldn’t change it. But Clint can’t ask me to marry him. He’s – he’s got an agreement with Miss Morse.’

Bucky frowns at that. ‘I hadn’t heard about that.’

‘It’s not official. It’s just an understanding sort of agreement. They’ll get married in another year or so, I think. When things change with Tony and Miss Potts, and Clint needs a different lodging. They make enough between them to get their own rooms. But obviously, it’s improper, even among us less wealthy sorts.’

Bucky make a noise like he wants to reply, but doesn’t trust the words he’s going to use. After a moment, he sighs.

‘Have you talked to him about it? How you feel, I mean?’

Laura touches her neck, licks her lips. ‘No. No, it wouldn’t be right to.’

‘Don’t you think it would be worth a try?’

‘No. Bucky, please. I’m going to have to marry someone I don’t love, don’t make me lose my best friend because of it.’

‘You don’t have to marry anyone.’

‘Oh, please, that’s what the May Fayre is for. To marry off the eligible girls that haven’t been claimed. It’s nothing new. Jenny Green got married, and she’s doing well, last I heard.’

Bucky eyes her. ‘When was that?’

‘I don’t know, a while ago now. I haven’t really kept up with her family. Why do you ask?’

‘Nothing, nothing. Just Steve’s starting on about how the pageant is a front for something nefarious, same as he does every year.’

Laura rolls her damp eyes. ‘He likes to find problems where there are none, we know this.’

‘You’ll still give Clint your favour at the tourney though, won’t you?’

She snorts. ‘Obviously. People might think I was sick if I didn’t. Even Mister Rumlow, if he does have real designs on my hand, would think me odd if I didn’t give Clint my favour. You should get home, before the rain gets worse.’

‘And if I see Clint? Should I send him here?’

‘Do what you think is best,’ she says, ‘but he’s going out of town today, looking at something down by the river.’

‘I thought he was dealing with the problem at the mines?’

She shrugs. ‘He got back home late last night, he stopped by on his way.’

Bucky’s lips purse.

‘I think you should talk to him.’

She smiles, sadly. ‘It won’t get us anywhere.’

She feels bad for lying to him, knowing full well that they had discussed how much they loved each other – and shown the same – last night, but they’re insufferable enough without the added involvement of them actually courting. She’s not wrong for not wanting them to know.

‘Get home safe, Buck. Make sure Steve gets home, too.’

Bucky kisses her hair, and swings his legs back out of the well, taking his leave.

* * *

Nat comes by to do some more work on Laura’s dress, and Laura fills her in.

‘I think they’re right. Rumlow’s not an option. But I understand. If Clint’s not got the balls to ask you, doesn’t mean someone else can’t.’

Laura, pinned into a scarecrow position, scoffs.

‘I don’t want to marry anyone,’ she says, ‘not really.’

‘Then don’t. I don’t really see the fuss. You’re being very indecisive about what you think on this one. I might almost be inclined to think you wanted to marry a certain someone.’

‘Then you’d be wrong.’

Nat hums, and puts some pins in her mouth so that she doesn’t have to answer.

Laura can’t get her gone fast enough, just to get the judgemental looks away from her.

* * *

There’s only a week left until the May Fayre before Laura sees Clint again. She’s not entirely certain how he managed to avoid her for a fortnight, but he did. Her dress is finished, and the kids are happy enough being taught, and Mister Rumlow hasn’t shown his face, so maybe what Tony said really did have an impact. Maybe, maybe not. She doesn’t know, and she’s not about to curse herself by mentioning it.

It’s been a little bit – sad – that Clint’s been avoiding her. She knows he’s been in town, because Signor Vanni said he’d looked miserable, and Natasha says he hasn’t shaved in at least a week. So he’s been in town, which means he’s avoiding her. She wonders if it’s because of the whole, marriage thing. It did come straight after they – dallied. Maybe he thinks she’d say yes, if someone else asked her. Maybe he thinks that if he just cuts her out of his life now, it’ll save the heartache later.

What it doesn’t do is change that she’d marry him in a heartbeat if _he_ asked, money and position and common sense be damned. She loves him, and she’d run away with him, if it came to that.

So when he finally shows his face, outside her cottage on a crisp April morning, a week before the Fayre, with a bunch of wildflowers in one hand and a basket of breakfast goods in the other, she’s about ready to cry.

‘Where have you been?’ she asks, and it comes out far sharper than it had any right to.

To his credit, he ducks his head and his ears go red, and he scuffs his feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I was being. Weak.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘you were. Come on in.’

She steps aside, and he comes in, and the warmth of him next to her is all she’s wanted for the time he’s been away. While they set up for breakfast, it feels like things are normal, like they haven’t been apart. She watches him, from the corner of her eye, as she slices the bread, and he looks – not at home, but not uncomfortable.

‘I’m glad you came by,’ she says, and he shrugs.

‘Wasn’t my greatest idea, staying away,’ he admits. ‘I thought – I don’t know what I though. Stark was talking about this castle prick coming to ask about you, and I don’t know. Just made it real.’

‘Real? Clint, I’m not going to marry anyone I don’t love.’

She tries to put emphasis on it, looks at him, but he’s not looking at her, and he’s as capable of understanding inflection as a bag of cats is able to go in one direction.

‘You don’t have to love someone to marry them, you just have to like them enough.’

‘You’re hopeless.’

‘Guess so.’

They don’t talk again for another few minutes, sitting in silence on either side of the table and not speaking.

‘Clint,’ she says eventually, when the silence grows to be too much. ‘You’re going to break my heart if you keep on like this. What really got your goat about Rumlow sniffing about?’

He finally looks at her, and she sees the fear in his eyes. She hasn’t seen it, not like this, since the night they brought Bucky onto her doorstep and her father had had to try and piece him back together.

‘I don’t want to lose you,’ he says, earnest, taking her hands. ‘I – someone might take you away from me, and I don’t want that. I thought, maybe. If I took myself away then maybe it would be easier.’

‘You’re an idiot.’

‘But my logic is sound,’ he argues. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s sound logic, you can’t fault me on that. Laura, I _love you_. I’m always going to love you. Not screaming it from the rooftops is killing me, but I don’t want to let anyone else know, I don’t want them to see this. Us. What we are.’

‘I’m pretty sure they have a bet,’ she says, soft. ‘About whether we’ll get together.’

‘I know they do,’ he nods, ‘I’m going to get the spoils eventually. It’s a waiting game. But even without that, I wouldn’t want them to know. It’s not their business. What I feel for you, it’s for you alone. They don’t need to know about it. No one does. But if they don’t know, they think that you can be married off to someone else. And I mean, you can. You don’t have to stay with me.’

‘Clint.’ It’s soft, considering, like she knows what he’s trying to say, but his ears are hot.

‘Laura,’ he says, just as soft. ‘Marry me.’

She looks at him then, in the dawn light of her open kitchen door and windows, and she looks at the barley-gold of his hair and the storm blue of his eyes and the freckles on his nose and shoulders where the sunlight is starting to catch him, and she looks at the chaps on his lips, where he’s worried it over and over. She can imagine him sitting there, watching the May Fayre get closer and closer, and worrying that this will be the end of whatever they might be. She can hear the thoughts going over and over and over in his mind, like a carousel out of control, and she can picture him worrying at his fingernails as he watches the girls practice on the maypole. She can imagine him lying awake at night and thinking about how to fix this, whatever this problem is, and how much it hurts in his gut to do what he thinks is right, no matter how wrong it is.

She can see the fear clear as day, and she licks her lips.

‘Yes,’ she says.


End file.
